


The Good Doctor

by raja815



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Battle fatigue, Depression, Gen, Gore, Ishbal | Ishval, PTSD, Surgery, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 01:07:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raja815/pseuds/raja815
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he can't find the bullet, Captain Hughes is going to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Doctor

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2009 for for the prompt "Hunt," on a thousand-word-limit contest. Edited slightly since then.

_You have to find it. You have to find it, or he’s going to die._

Knox repeats this, trying for urgency, and finds none. He feels only vaguely tired as he washes his hands, pulls on his gloves, and reaches for his limited bag of tools. It’s almost laughable. Enterotomes and rib cutters and deadly little needles full of potassium chloride he has—his official title now is burn pathologist, but he knows he is little more than a paid assassin, someone who can take the charred and melted corpses and almost-corpses of the Ishbalan victims and turn them into something the State can process—but the surgical clamps and suction tips and dilators he once commanded as a simple military surgeon are nowhere to be seen. All he can salvage are scalpel, forceps, needle, and a scant amount of black silk suture thread.

He tries to feel angry. He can’t.

Even earlier today, he would’ve thought the idea of having a life to save instead of POWs to mutilate might invigorate him, might give him a reason to eat his rations and write to his wife, but it doesn’t. He can find no incentive to operate, no inspiration… except for the possibility that Major Mustang might go over the edge completely and turn those alchemical instruments of death he wears on his hands on Knox himself if Knox refuses.

Because it’s Mustang’s best friend lying here, bleeding out on Knox’s table from an Ishbalan gunshot to the hypogastric region of his abdomen.

So Knox makes himself take scalpel in hand.

He holds it firm, parting the Captain’s skin like a finger through soft sand, extending the swollen bullet wound to a slash like a pair of gaping lips. A new, ominously grimacing mouth carved into the groaning man’s abdomen. And like a mouth, Knox opens it. 

Captain Hughes moans weakly—corpses don’t need anesthetics, so the best Knox had been able to do was an overlarge injection of local, enough to kill the pain but not the pressure—and Major Mustang looks suddenly, violently, ill. Knox wonders if he should have sent Mustang out; the man had been uncharacteristically desperate as he dragged his friend in, both of them so soaked in gore the blue wool uniforms looked almost violet. Knox wouldn’t have recognized Maes Hughes but for the glasses… and the terror in Mustang’s eyes. Knox knew there wasn’t another soldier in the whole Amestrian army whose casualty could spread the panic so thick on the alchemist’s face.

“Please,” Mustang had gasped, “Knox, please…” And then he babbled great gushes of language : _there was a raid, they came out of nowhere, I can’t find the field medics, I tried everywhere, you’re the only doctor I can find, please…_

Knox wishes Mustang’s ability to care were contagious. 

The organs are inflamed, gritty with the omnipresent Ishbalan sand, thick with the heavy smells of shit and bile from where the intestines are nicked. Knox has only a few minutes to clean and suture the wake of destruction the gunshot left behind before the man bleeds out completely… but he can’t do a thing before he finds the bullet. 

So he starts digging.

He slips his right index finger inside, folding the loops of bowel as gently as he can. His fingers grow warm. Droplets of sweat dilute the blood on the Captain’s skin. Knox thinks about infection and wonders if there are any antibiotics left in camp. He remembers the hospital back at Central, where there were people to prep the patients with anesthetics and catheters so they lay nice and still during operation and didn’t gasp and tremble and dribble piss onto the table when the forceps brushed their bladders. Where there were assistants instead of half-hysterical alchemical killing machines at your side.

But he isn’t there; he’s here.

Knox slides a rift of membrane away and a glimmer of metal reflects the light. A few years ago, Knox might have cursed. Now he can barely manage a sigh. 

It’s a fragment. Ishbalan bullets are a surgeon’s nightmare. Their hollow centers split into tiny pieces of leaden shrapnel the second they enter the body. He’d hoped he might get lucky and have a simple removal. He should’ve known better; they always fracture. That’s why it’s standard procedure to dig them out. 

“Put these pieces together,” Knox says, dropping the tiny sliver of metal into a ceramic collecting pan. “Or we’ll never know if it’s all out.”

Mustang nods weakly. His eyes are like a frightened animal’s, huge and strangely pale. 

Knox slides his forceps through perforations and under organs, using his fingers to search when the gore is too thick to see through, soaking up the excess blood with cotton gauze. He finds himself thinking of his wedding night, when his virgin bride had groaned in pain as her blood soaked into the sheets, of the birth of his son where there had been different sheets and even more blood. Every moment of his life has been punctuated by blood, even the happy ones. 

Suddenly Knox finds himself hoping that Hughes _will_ die, and Mustang _will_ lose it, because burning to death in a flash of fire doesn’t sound half bad right now.

He pulls out seven pieces before Mustang gasps that’s all, that’s everything, and Knox can nod and flush with saline, suture, finish. The Captain has either fallen asleep or passed out; either way, he isn’t moving anymore, though his heartbeat remains stubbornly strong around Knox’s fingers. 

When it’s all done, Mustang asks if he’ll live, and Knox shrugs. 

“Find that Doctor Marcoh. Augmented alchemical healing. He’ll have him back on the front lines in a week.”

Mustang leaves to do it. Knox washes his rubber gloves, tries half-heartedly to radio for antibiotics or transport to a clinic and gets no response, lights a cigarette, listens to the faraway sounds of combat, and looks at the sutured incision and the bloody scraps of bullet.

He wonders why he even bothered.


End file.
